Friday, September 20, 2013

ASUC Should Embrace Rational Reform

California’s Democratic legislators have
been living in fantasyland since November.They’ve spent much of the last year coasting on supermajorities hard-won
and largely un-used, congratulating themselves on a job well done.The party leadership is clearly unaware of
how hollow their self-satisfaction rings across a state that was terrorised for
a decade by the Republican Party’s anti-public agenda, an agenda which was then
pressed home with a vengeance by Democratic Governor Jerry Brown between 2011
and 2013.

One of the social groups in the state
hit hardest in recent years by public disinvestment, pushed by the state GOP
thanks to undemocratic supermajority rules while spineless Democrats looked on,
is the student population that populates California’s three-tier system of
higher education, once the envy of the world.To be sure, the Community Colleges, the California State University, and
the University of California still provide an excellent education to
Californians, and the UC still puts off a glimmer that attracts brilliant
students from around the world to study and research there.

But while Prop 30—the centrepiece of
Democrats’ supposed roll-back of Republican rule—promised to “fix” UC and CSU,
for students, crippling burdens remain.Democrats’ numbers in the legislature might have gone up, but student
tuition has remained indefensibly high.Californians pay over $12,000 per year to attend UC at a time when their
job prospects on graduation are worse than ever, meaning that the mountain of
debt represented by a four-year degree for many students—Berkeley undergraduates
who live in campus housing can expect to pay out $33,320 per year by the campus’
own estimates—is a more formidable barrier and daunting proposition than ever.

And the students who aspire to attend UC
and CSU face barriers of their own.California’s schools have long been in a tailspin, with class sizes
increasing while teachers face a broader array of demands on their time than
ever.At the same time, support staff—including
those who are critical when it comes to shepherding students who are the first
in their families to attend college through the application process—have been
cut.Communities have seen libraries
closed and an array of other social services—particularly those designed by
society to provide for those pushed to the economic brink by forces beyond
their control—cut back relentlessly.

For years this was driven by a state
Republican Party run by fundamentalist crackpots who were devoted to testing
and re-testing an economic model which punished people, entrenched inequality,
and promoted poverty instead of providing uplift, levelling the playing field,
and creating a safety net.The society
that it took decades to build was quickly torn apart.

But today, the waffling cosmetics
represented by sad efforts like Prop 30 aside, Democrats are beginning to own
the problem.Jerry Brown was elected
Governor in 2010 but declined to tackle the structural impediments to
governance which famously make California so dysfunctional.Democrats won supermajorities in 2012 but
have proved skittish and cowardly in using them.They’ve restricted themselves to broadly
popular measures which provide momentary relief while leaving California’s
dragons untouched and sometimes even entrenching the most egregious elements of
our defective democracy.

Representative of that dysfunction is
Proposition 13, passed in 1978 as an act of generational warfare which
continues to hamstring our republic 35 years later.Prop 13 entrenches minority rule—absurdly
requiring a supermajority to govern effectively—while creating extraordinarily
volatility in the state’s revenues thanks to its restrictions on property taxes,
simultaneously forcing precisely the kind of centralisation that Republicans
purport to hate.Along with a host of
other measures down the decades, Prop 13 is turning us into a morally and
materially impoverished community, in which systematic inequality and political
quagmire are written into our massively overburdened constitution, and given a
democratic veneer which makes the Democratic Party afraid to touch them.

Showing more foresight than their
counterparts in the California Assembly, Senate, or all-but-empty Governor’s
office, students
in the ASUC Senate at Berkeley will shortly debate a bill advocating the reform
of Prop 13.If student senators
agreed on the bill, they would use it to pressure legislators and the governor,
calling particular attention to how tapping property taxes through the use of a
split roll which treats citizen homeowners differently from commercial and
corporate property owners, could help to reinvigorate lapsed state funding for
California’s universities.

The ASUC students should be commended
for attempting to generate a debate about something that our
supposedly-responsible political leaders refuse to discuss.But what we need is something more
far-reaching than tinkering with property tax.As described in the Daily
Californian, the students’ measure does not address the supermajority
requirements enshrined by Prop 13.Nor
does it address the litany of detailed requirements regarding tax policy and
spending formulas that have been written by decades of propositions into the
state constitution, effectively binding legislators’ hands.

SB 9—the students’ measure—is in some
respects just a more far-reaching version of Prop 30.It is treating one of the symptoms of
California’s democratic disease rather than aiming at the root of the
problem.

Students and citizens looking for a
roadmap for democratic clarity could do worse than consult Mark Paul and Joe
Mathews’ California Crackup: How Reform
Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It, which gives a good account of
our state’s unmaking.The authors also
explain why half-measures where institutional reform are concerned might only
make things worse by tightening the restraints on our political structure,
which are already so knotted, tangled, and weighted down with constitutional
requirements that even Houdini—no less a tight-fisted, mean-spirited
opportunist like Jerry Brown—couldn’t escape them.

People dismiss efforts at large-scale
reform by saying it would be difficult and messy.I can’t imagine anything messier, more
difficult, and ultimately more futile and dispiriting for those who would like
to preserve some faith in democratic processes than what we experience
now.We live with institutionalised
deadlock which forces punishing austerity and prevents us from reacting to
economic, social and demographic developments overtaking our state.A generation of self-interested and anti-social
voters sought to bring history to a halt, and their actions, combined with the
machinations of one political party without a heart and another without a
spine, together with a public which refuses to take responsibility for its
actions, have degraded California.

While I’d hesitate to say that nothing
that came out of rational, wholesale reform could possibly be worse than the
current Frankensteinian creation that is state politics, I think we stand a
pretty good chance of bettering our the Golden State.That will require the commitment from people
in high political office today, and from the public.But it will require a spark, and if ASUC
senators can contribute to that, so much the better.But for the sake of California as a whole,
they should expand their field of vision and advocate for something more
sweeping, substantial, and effective than more of the piecemeal reform which
has become the bane of our state’s community.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I work as an assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research. This blog also appears on the website of the Redding Record Searchlight.